Cusco Quechua
Cusco Quechua is a dialect of Southern Quechua spoken in Cusco and the Department of Cusco of Peru.
It is the Quechua variety used by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in Cusco, which also prefers the Spanish-based five-vowel alphabet. On the other hand, the official alphabet used by the ministry of education has only three vowels.
Phonology
Vowels
Quechua only has three vowel phonemes: and, with no diphthongs. Monolingual speakers pronounce them as respectively, but Spanish realizations may also be found. When the vowels appear adjacent to uvular consonants, they are rendered more like , respectively. There is debate about whether Cusco Quechua has five or three vowel phonemes:.While historically Proto-Quechua clearly had just three vowel phonemes /*a, *ɪ, *ʊ/, and although some other Quechua varieties have an increased number of vowels as a result of phonological vowel length emergence or of monophthongization, the current debate about the Cusco variety seems to be not phonological in matter but just orthographic.
| Phoneme | IPA Phonetic realizations | 3-vowel alphabet | 5-vowel alphabet |
| a | a | ||
| i | i , e | ||
| u | u , o |
Consonants
of the tap results in a trill.About 30% of the modern Quechua vocabulary is borrowed from Spanish, and some Spanish sounds may have become phonemic even among monolingual Quechua speakers.